


The Quiet Moments

by TheEverShipping



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke, Eventual Smut, F/M, Madi the Matchmaker, Thank You For Your Snide Comments John Murphy, canon complaint, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 05:36:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15942842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheEverShipping/pseuds/TheEverShipping
Summary: Canon Compliant/Season 6 Theoretical. The moments that finally lead us to Bellarke. Eventual smut but very very slow burn.





	1. Chapter 1

Bellamy walks up and down the cryo chamber. The crystals keep him from seeing the features of everyone he has left—to love, to hate, to be _the good guy_ with. His fingers hover over the computer screen, tracing the names he knows best without actually touching them. _Raven. Murphy. Echo. Emori. Miller. Octavia._

“Hey,” Clarke’s voice vertebrates down the long metal hall. It’s like trickling water. Smooth, steady and gentle--able to save a life or take it. 

“Hey,” he returns. His fingers leave the screen and he turns to face her. “Did you find it?”  
  
Her lips press together, her brow creases. She nods. 

It feels like a punch in the gut, sends a fresh wave of ache into his bones. “Monty got us all the way here, his one request that we do better… But here we are again.” 

She keeps moving toward him, neither fast nor slow, just steady. He really is depressed that there are signs of intelligent life--signs they might have to go to war, once again. But part of his brain is pushing that aside, because it can't help but notice the natural sway of her hips, her chest rising and falling, the way her lips—still cracked and ragged from a battle that happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago—part, revealing her white teeth. 

When she’s two feet away he expects her to stop. But she doesn’t. She slides her toes between his, and presses the side of her face to his chest. Her hands land on his ribs and wind up over his shoulder blades. She pulls him flush to her—stomach to stomach, pelvis to pelvis, thigh to thigh. That fresh ache in his bones bleeds out, making him feel weak and light. 

He wraps one arm around the whole of her shoulders, holding her tight. His other hand twines into her hair, cradling her head. He breathes in the smell of her—the smell of earth still lingers between her strands of gold. 

“We have to hope that peace is an option, Bellamy,” she whispers. "They might be... friendly."

He kisses the top of her head and just keeps breathing. Once he lets go of her everything changes, again. Standing here with his arms around her—the peace and quiet and safety of just the two of them—he understands why Monty and Harper decided to stay awake. Even if it did mean living out their lives in a metal box, eating nothing but algae 'til the day they died. 

Clarke holds tight to his back, but her head slowly scrapes along the bottom of his chin. He can feel his stubble catch in her hair. Until her hair becomes skin. Her forehead, then the side of her cheek. She shifts, standing on her tip toes, until the line of her jaw is sliding along his. 

He leans into the touch, pressing his face to hers. He’s never touched anyone quite like this before, but he finds he knows how to. It’s primal. And so intimate. 

The tip of his nose nears the place where her throat and ear and neck meet. This is dangerous—but it doesn’t feel that way right now. It feels like… like the only time in his life that gravity hasn’t been closing in around him, crushing and contorting him, making him fight. 

So he just lets himself keep slowly falling into her. He doesn’t speed anything up. He lets the motion remain steady. Like it was always meant to. 

His nose brushes past that sweet little patch of her neck. The tip tucks into the dip right behind her earlobe. His lips land right where they can feel the beat of her heart. That divot is so soft. 

Her jaw tilts to the side, giving him deeper access—it’s not a jerky motion, it’s just a little, just enough. He presses his lips in deeper. Lets them part. Sucks in the taste of her. 

Then she pulls away. Not a lot. Not violently. But her arms leave his shoulders and trail up his chest and her fingers twine into his hair. Electricity runs down his spine, to the tips of his toes—to the tips of everywhere. 

She’s still on her toes and the tip of her nose brushes his—the most gentle of nuzzles. Her fingers guide his face down, ’til his forehead touches hers. His eyes are closed. As much as he wants to look at her, he doesn’t want to let anything distract him from the way this feels.

He blames instinct for what happens next. For the way his hands drop to her waist, wrapping over her hips. For the nudge against her nose as his chin tilts, coaxing hers up. For the way his lips brush against hers, slightly parted. For the way they sink into hers and his tongue darts out like it’s only calling is to learn every single crevice of her.  

She pulls away, violently yanking him from the tiny pocket of heaven she’d thrust upon him with her touch. He feels his guts—his heart—clench with the desire to step forward, to pull her back, like she’s an oxygen mask. Desperate.  
  
But his eyes are open now. They are looking at hers—bright and not quiet green or blue, but most certainly wet. Tears fall out of them, sliding down her cheeks. She’s looking at him like he’s betrayed her.  
  
“Echo.” She whispers. 

“What?” He blurts out before his brain catches up—All that lightness he’d felt. Those blissful moments. Now it’s like a grenade has been dropped on him and he’s got ringing in his ears and can’t quite see strait. Except he can. He can see her. Crying.

“Echo.” She repeats. 

“Clarke,” he implores. “You were dead.”

She bites her bottom lip and her face trembles. All that escapes is the littlest squeak. 

He steps forward. 

She steps back. 

Her nostrils flare. Her chest heaves up. Her whole body rattles as she slowly exhales through her mouth. “I know.”

He steps forward again. “Clarke, if you had been with—“  
  
“Don’t!” She cuts him off, backing away more. “It doesn’t matter. She loves you. Obviously you two were perfectly happy together on the Ring. You deserve to be happy. I’m not—I’m not going to get in the way of that.”

“Clarke! Just—it’s not that simple. It’s not—“  
  
“Yes,” she definitively says. “It is.”

Then she turns, and she walks away. With every step she take the room grows colder. The gravity gets stronger. He gets heavier. 

Everything feels wrong.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke doesn't want to talk. Bellamy does. She thinks she's ensured they won't get the chance. She's wrong.

He probably should follow her. But he doesn’t know what to say. Even if he did, he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t let him say it. So he’d try to reach out and touch her—but she’d stop him from doing that too. And he’s dealing with too many different kinds of heartache right now to stomach another rejection.

His feet take him back to the command room. No one is here. Monty’s logs sit on the screen. He sits down and hits play again. 

He watches Monty and Harper grow older through little snippets. He smiles again, at Harper’s pregnant belly, at Monty kissing his baby’s head. He feels tears leak down his cheeks when Monty appears, gray-haired and old and says that he doesn’t want to see the new planet because Harper isn’t there to see it with him. 

Before his conscious mind can put a stop to it, the thought crosses over from the unconscious— _How would it have felt to wake up alone? To wake up without Clarke here?_

His guts twist and his throat closes up. His heart clenches. It’s like it speeds up and slows down at the same time. It begs him for action and paralyzes him simultaneously.  
  
_You didn’t think about Echo._ His subconscious pushes. 

 _I know,_ he snarls back at himself. Anger, that familiar friend, revs to life to save him from whatever is making him feel all this stress… But it can’t save him. There are no good choices. 

His feet are making another choice for him now though. They walk and walk and his brain is catching up on the way, even though everything is jumbled and he’s not really sure. He just has to find Clarke and then whatever comes out of his mouth they’ll find a way to make sense of it together and he won’t let her stop him.

He filters through room after room, until he hears soft steps and spots glints of sunshine. His compressed throat suddenly releases and he will not let himself stop to think about the consequences because he did every single time before.  
  
“Clarke, you might be able to ignore what happened, but I can’t.” She turns toward him, her eyes wide. He keeps walking forward, around the bend. Emboldened, full of purpose. “I thought you were dead and it was the—“

“What happened? She’s already tried to kill you again?” Murphy’s voice, bored as always. He steps out—he was just out of his line of sight, just beyond Clarke. Raven steps out too, and Jordan… And Echo. 

Echo smiles and runs toward him. Her arms wrap around his neck and he hugs her back—because he does love her. She is is family. But over her shoulder, his eyes find Clarke’s. 

Clarke’s lips are set in a tight line. Her eyes are hard. She doesn’t look angry though. Just resigned. She gives him a little nod—but all of a sudden he’s angry again. _She woke them up just to avoid me._

Echo pulls back and she moves forward to kiss him. He lets her, and he kisses her back— _I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad we’re all okay._ But he doesn’t feel that thing that intense heat, that perfect balance that stirred to life, twenty minutes ago, when it was Clarke pressed against him instead of her. 

_Fuck. I never should have kissed her. Now I know what it’s like and she’s just—just fucked me up again._

Part of him, an immature part, a part he refuses to listen to, wants him to kiss Echo back hard. To make a show of it. To punish Clarke the way she’s punishing him. But he won’t use Echo that way. 

 _You were fine using her on the ring,_ some treacherous corner of his mind whispers.

 _I wasn’t using her,_ he argues back. _I do like her. I do love her. I do care._

So he breaks Echo’s kiss and hugs her to him tight. He catches Clarke’s eye one more time, as she turns to look at something Raven is pointing to on the wall. He sees some sort of sadness, and that makes him angry too. _It’s her fault. She took the coward’s way out by waking them all up._

And he’s been here before. When she was busy loving Finn. When she left him to go wander the wilderness. When her heart broke over Lexa’s death. When she ran off to that tower and he didn’t go with her. When she slapped him and left him to die. _Fuck her._

He breaks away from Echo, but looks her in the eye and gives her a reassuring squeeze on the arm. He steps forward, purposely steeping between Clarke and Raven to give Raven a hug. He reaches for Murphy, who roles his eyes but hugs him anyway.

“Guys, I need to talk to Clarke alone. It’ll just be a minute.” 

“No,” Clarke instantly objects, anger flaring to life in her own eyes, “we need to figure out a reconnaissance plan. Raven and I—“

“This will just take a minute Clarke,” he says, keeping his voice low and steady, his eyes firmly fixed on hers.  
  
She glares at him hard. Her chest heaves up and down. Her fists clench. “You can talk to me in front of our friends.”

That’s the straw that pushes him over the edge. He grits his teeth, grabs her by the wrist, and drags her forward. She struggles a bit, but not enough to convince him that part of her isn’t willing to talk about this.  
  
“Hey!” Raven says, her brow furrowed. “What’s wrong with you Bellamy?”

“Clarke and I still haven’t had the chance to talk about how she left me to die in Polis, so before we start making any plans that require me to trust her with my life again, we need to have it out.”  
  
“We did talk about it!” Clarke angrily objects.

“Not enough,” he replies, and keeps dragging her forward. 

“Let them, Raven.” Murphy says. “Otherwise they’re going to fight the whole time we’re on the ground.” 

“I agree with Murphy,” Jordan says, laughing a bit nervously. “When Mom and Dad were mad at each other, the longer they waited to talk about it, the worse it got.” 

Everyone’s eyes flick to him. When Bellamy’s flick away, they get caught by Echo’s. Hers have darkened. They dart from him, to his hand around Clarke’s wrist, calculating. He looks away from her and back at the group before repeating, “It will only take a minute.” 

“Fine,” Raven says, like the permission was hers to give. “When you’re done, meet us in the Algae farm, Jordan was just about to show us.” 

Bellamy nods at her. He avoids looking at Echo again. He tightens his grip on Clarke’s wrist, but she suddenly steps forward, in front of him, like she’s the one dragging him. 

“Let’s just get this over with,” she whispers.

He let’s her go. She marches forward. He doesn’t know where she’s leading, but that hasn’t stopped him from following her in the past—even when it should have.

—

She picks a room that must have been part of the crew’s quarters. It’s got several bunks, but no indicators that anyone who ever slept in here was chained up. When the door shuts behind them, she turns and faces him, legs spread, arms crossed over her chest, brows knit together, eyes blazing with rage.  
  
“What?” She demands. 

“You don’t get to be angry at me!” He tells her, full of righteous indignation. “You are the one who took the cowards way out.”  
  
“I woke our friends up because we’re going to need their help figuring out a strategy—“

“Bullshit!” He cuts her off. “You woke them up because you’re afraid of--of the way we feel about each other!”  
  
“I am not afraid!” She snarls back. “I will not to do something else that is going to cause division amongst our people when we’re about to embark on settling on a new planet we know _nothing_ about. I don’t want to be selfish.”  
  
“Division? No one is going to care! And who—“  
  
“Echo!” She throws her hands up in exasperation. “Echo is going to care! Echo is going to be hurt! Echo is going to be divided—we can’t afford to have anyone going rogue because they feel wronged, and Echo has been wanting to kill me since we met! I can’t have division among any of our people even if it’s only one person. We need to be united—we need to do better, like Monty said! We can’t do that if Echo hates us. We can’t make objective, good decisions, if we’re wrapped up any each other. We can’t—“

As she talks, her hand waving around, pacing in a circle, her eyes going this way and that, but always finding his again, he feels something in his chest shift. The anger is still there, but something warm and fond is rising up from the deep too.  
  
“I’ve been wrapped up in you Clarke.” He cuts her off again. “I’ve been wrapped up in you since you were in love with Finn. I’ve been wrapped up in you since you sent me into Mount Weather and since you left me alone in Arkadia. I was so wrapped up in you that I risked killing my own sister to save you. Even after you left me to die, I was still wrapped up in you no matter how angry—“

“You poisoned your sister because you knew it was the right thing to do—you didn’t do it to save me. And I didn’t leave you to die—I knew Octavia wouldn’t kill you. You betrayed me—you promised me you’d protect Madi and then the first chance you got you did the one thing that thrust her into the middle of danger. You didn’t care enough about me to protect her.”  
  
“Madi would have followed Octavia into battle as her second and died if I hadn’t asked her to take the Flame! I was protecting her! I was protecting all of us! I was protecting you!” He shouts, anger rising to the forefront again.  
  
“And don’t act like you were in love with me all those years!” She goes on like he hadn’t said anything at all. “When I was in love with Finn? After Mount Weather? I have a memory Bellamy—I remember all the girls you were sleeping with at the drop ship! I remember that you had a girlfriend—Gina, right?—while I was gone! And, in case you’ve forgotten, you have one now—and you did for years. You can’t blame it on thinking I was dead. Thinking I was dead isn’t the reason you fell in love with Echo. It is—“

“Yes it is!” He hisses. “I mourned you for years! Four years after I thought you died Echo came to my bed and I… I let her in because I thought you were dead! Yes, I love her. Yes, I care about her. But if you’d been up there I—“

“What?” She scathingly interrupts. “We would have been like Monty and Harper? Happy and peaceful and full of dreams about little farms and babies?” 

“Maybe!” He shouts, “I don’t know what would have happened because I can’t predict anything about you Clarke! From the moment we met you have been a puzzle I can’t solve—I’ve learned to not even guesses because they’re going to be wrong. But I am damn well certain I would have spent those six years being in love with you anyway. I cared about Gina, but if you hadn’t left me to go wander the wilderness, I wouldn’t have been with her. And the girls at the drop ship—obviously at first I didn’t know you, but by the time I did you were in love with Finn and you hated me and they were… They were there! You don’t get to be mad at me because I tried to be with other people every time you didn’t want me!”

He’s huffing and puffing and there are no more words left. Just eyes now. His eyes staring into hers. His fury and hurt and anger reflecting in hers. Her lips part but then they close. They open and close again. And again.  
  
“Of course,” he sighs. “Well fine. You don’t feel the same way. Sorry.” 

He turns and punches the buttons to make the door slide open. He hesitates for only a second before stepping out. He’s too hurt by the fact that she doesn’t feel the same and angry that she is throwing everyone he tried to love like he loved her, but couldn’t in his face. His hands and eyes are clenched and the door is sliding shut and—

“I do feel the same,” she whispers. 

_Hiss. Click._

The door is closed. His eyes fly open and his hand flies to the buttons on this side, because he’s got to get back in but a hand lands on top of them.

He turns again. Echo is standing there. Easily eye to eye with him, frowning seriously.  
  
“Bellamy,” she says. “I’m angry at her for leaving you to die too—I hate her. But the Commander will need her. And we need the Commander if we are going to survive on this new planet. You have to let your anger go and make peace with her.”

He gapes at her wide-eyed. 

 _Guess these doors are sound proof,_ some part of his brain registers. 

“You’re right,” is all he manages too say, because the rest of his brain is still waiting for him to punch open that door and go back to Clarke but… 

But Echo’s words mirror Clarke’s in a strange way. _Unity. Survive._

Echo’s hand slips into his. “Give Wanheda a chance to accept your anger and take responsibility for it. She has a cold heart. It will cool her head quickly. While it does, let’s go eat with the others.”

He glances back at the door. He hears the words Clarke was trying to say, while he was too busy being fired up by all the things he needed to say, to hear them:

_We can’t afford to have anyone going rogue because they feel wronged—We can’t have division among our people—We can’t make objective, good decisions, and if we’re wrapped up in each other._

_She’s right,_ he internally sighs.  _As always._

Echo steps forward, her fingers twisting to lace tightly between his. He can’t bring himself to curl his fingers back, but he doesn’t take them away either. He lets himself be pulled down the hall by Echo, away from Clarke and the room where the truth got to pour out—at least some of it.

He let’s himself be pulled back toward his people. Away from…from the person he wishes was his person. He wishes Clarke was wrong. He wishes the right thing wasn’t always the thing that takes him way from her. But there’s no point. Obviously that wish never comes true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and commented! I'm glad the characters feel realistic to you guys--I feel like that's the most important thing in fanfic, so that's a huge compliment! How does everyone feel this chapter? Is the drama real, or too much? And, who thinks Echo actually heard everything, and she's just using those spy skills? *Insert devil face here* <3

**Author's Note:**

> This just flowed out when I was supposed to be doing actual work. Oops. The wait for Season 6 is just so painful though--I couldn't help it! I'm totally new to this fandom, so I'd love to hear thoughts and know if anyone wants me to continue down this uncharted road. =)


End file.
